MacEachern: A walk amid the wreckage

It was, I think, late on a Tuesday night when one of us -- maybe reporter Charlotte-Anne Lucas, maybe me -- stumbled onto a charred page from a book of religious quotations lying off to the side of Middlebelt Road. Under the heading "Suffering and Death," was a quotation from Psalm 34:18:

Between Detroit and Phoenix, countless hearts were breaking that night of Aug. 18, 1987. On that wretched, hot night, a pair of reporters and a photographer, led by a Wayne, Mich., County sheriff's deputy, walked the still-smoking wreckage of Northwest Flight 255, which 50 or so hours earlier had gone down on takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I was among them.

By standard crash-site protocol, our tour was inappropriate. For all I knew, illegal. It had been arranged by Lucas, a brilliant, dogged reporter whose pursuit of the causes behind the crash of Flight 255 impresses me to this day.

And the fact that she may have sweet-talked a hound-dog sheriff's deputy into breaking rules and leading that midnight tour (his profound disappointment at seeing me tag along was plain) only impressed me more.

On Monday, Aug. 17, I had convinced my editors at the then-

Mesa Tribune that my hometown knowledge of Detroit might prove valuable, so they packed me off to join Lucas and photographer Gary O'Brien. I found them that night in a restaurant in Romulus, Mich., near Metro. They were spent. Twenty-four hours of reliving horror among the devastated families of plane-crash victims had drained them. It is the worst duty in journalism.

I had been working for the Tribune just a few weeks. It was my first daily-newspaper job, and I knew next to nothing about the frantic, complex, nerve-jangling effort that goes into turning out a compelling and accurate story, overnight, about how 156 people perished in one explosive moment of horror 2,000 miles from Mesa.

You learn quick. My hometown, Detroit, had been utterly traumatized by the crash. Businesses and schools had closed. Even the cops had a sense of devastation about them. Every planeload of passengers departing Metro could look down and see the devastation, the black line of death up Middlebelt. Not since the race riots of 1967 had the city seemed so wounded.

And in Arizona, where two-thirds of the victims lived, people were clinging to every word of this terrible story. I never had felt such a sense of obligation.

I was there to soak up the sense of things. The awful, somber helplessness. The miracle of Cecelia Cichan, the lone survivor.

By coincidence, my own aunt was dying, in the final, terrible throes of lung cancer, at a hospital not 10 minutes from Metro airport. I found some time that week to see her one last time. The irony that an enormous human tragedy had allowed me to bid farewell to Aunt Teresa was not lost on me. My hometown that week was awash in death, great and small.

In reporting the hard elements of the crash, Lucas was amazing.

She worked phones, developing contacts and insight that other reporters, including the national ones, didn't have. In the middle of the night, she roamed the hallways of our hotel adjacent to Metro, finding anguish-riddled commercial airline pilots, many of whom told her -- thoroughly off the record -- that, yes, your instincts are almost certainly true. The crew likely did overlook extending the wing flaps, crucial to lifting off a heavy airliner, thus dooming Flight 255.

And then she wrangled that tour, that walking tour of a still-smoldering Hades of twisted metal, molten concrete on the Interstate 94 overpass abutments and the detritus of death.

We saw the amazingly intact cockpit and wondered why the crew didn't survive. The inferno, after all, was long-since extinguished. And we saw where they found little Cecelia, barely alive and likely saved from the crush of impact and the worst of the flames by her mother's body.

I was a rookie newspaper reporter on the most heartbreaking story I would ever cover. I was lucky to be in the company of pros.